Catalogue Raisonné, Prestel
Our best insight into this mythological entanglement of early voyeurism, fetishism and friendship may be found in the capital painting, The Meeting. In order to analyse such a complex painting – Lindner’s only real group portrait – it is necessary to name the pictorial quotations and sources: van Dongen, Hirshfield and Max Ernst. The lady with her back to the viewer at the front edge of the picture is clearly from Max Ernst’s Weib, Greis und Blume (1923/1924, The Museum of Modern Art, New York). Furthermore, the upper section of the laced corset reminds one of the fan- like headdress of the woman in the same painting. Next one discovers that the lace of the corset in fact forms a cat-like head. This head, which the viewer can make out in the criss-cross of laces, is at the same height as the head of the tiger staring at the viewer. Suddenly the bewildering encounter becomes readable. Lindner is using a system of associations which could be described in rhetorical terms as metonymic: corset becomes a metaphor for predator. What at first sight seems to be an allusion suddenly becomes an inescapable image: woman as predator. It is the main theme of Lindner’s art- the helplessness of the man as opposed to the dominance of the woman. He explained this as follows: « The woman is in any case more
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interesting than the man. The woman has imagination. That helps her to survive. The man, by contrast, is a simple affair, both physically and physiologically. The woman is the stronger, she is geared towards giving the man his lumps of sugar, as long as she gets something for them. But now, at the end of the 20th century, she wants to keep the sugar for her- self. » As in the Demoiselles d’Avignon we are faced here by five women. The formal correspondences which link the face of the predator and the pattern on the laced corset, lead to predatory woman, to Judith, Lilith and Delilah, to Wedekind’s prologue to Lulu « What do you see in comedies and tragedies ?! Domestic animals, with such decorous feelings… The real animal… my work is the only place where you will see that. » Little by little this pleasure in props and artificiality led to a positively halucinatory cosmetic exterior, to panerotic human apparatuses constructed from identifiable individual parts. In these creatures the over-refined transference of desire from the body to clothing, of the embrace to resistance, as in Musil, have given way to an often brutal fetishism involving leather, rubber and straps. Premonitions of cybersex and of the ceremonies of the body regulated by the fear of touch accumulate over the years. All
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Our best insight into this mythological entanglement of early voyeurism, fetishism and friendship may be found in the capital painting, The Meeting. In order to analyse such a complex painting – Lindner’s only real group portrait – it is necessary to name the pictorial quotations and sources: van Dongen, Hirshfield and Max Ernst. The lady with her back to the viewer at the front edge of the picture is clearly from Max Ernst’s Weib, Greis und Blume (1923/1924, The Museum of Modern Art, New York). Furthermore, the upper section of the laced corset reminds one of the fan- like headdress of the woman in the same painting. Next one discovers that the lace of the corset in fact forms a cat-like head. This head, which the viewer can make out in the criss-cross of laces, is at the same height as the head of the tiger staring at the viewer. Suddenly the bewildering encounter becomes readable. Lindner is using a system of associations which could be described in rhetorical terms as metonymic: corset becomes a metaphor for predator. What at first sight seems to be an allusion suddenly becomes an inescapable image: woman as predator. It is the main theme of Lindner’s art- the helplessness of the man as opposed to the dominance of the woman. He explained this as follows: « The woman is in any case more
interesting than the man. The woman has imagination. That helps her to survive. The man, by contrast, is a simple affair, both physically and physiologically. The woman is the stronger, she is geared towards giving the man his lumps of sugar, as long as she gets something for them. But now, at the end of the 20th century, she wants to keep the sugar for her- self. » As in the Demoiselles d’Avignon we are faced here by five women. The formal correspondences which link the face of the predator and the pattern on the laced corset, lead to predatory woman, to Judith, Lilith and Delilah, to Wedekind’s prologue to Lulu « What do you see in comedies and tragedies ?! Domestic animals, with such decorous feelings… The real animal… my work is the only place where you will see that. » Little by little this pleasure in props and artificiality led to a positively halucinatory cosmetic exterior, to panerotic human apparatuses constructed from identifiable individual parts. In these creatures the over-refined transference of desire from the body to clothing, of the embrace to resistance, as in Musil, have given way to an often brutal fetishism involving leather, rubber and straps. Premonitions of cybersex and of the ceremonies of the body regulated by the fear of touch accumulate over the years. All
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